


reconstituted

by alderations



Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [29]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Injury Recovery, M/M, Mechtober, Mentions of temporary character death, Queerplatonic Relationships, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:14:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27276274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: Brian jolts awake with a start, disoriented first by waking up and then, moments later, by the realization that he was actually asleep for the first time in millennia. He can’t remember the last time he was unconscious without simply being dead.(Whumptober Day 29: reluctant bedrest)
Relationships: Drumbot Brian & Nastya Rasputina, Drumbot Brian/Jonny d'Ville
Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [29]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950916
Comments: 14
Kudos: 106
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	reconstituted

Brian jolts awake, disoriented first by waking up and then, moments later, by the realization that he was actually  _ asleep  _ for the first time in millennia. He can’t remember the last time he was unconscious without simply being dead.

Before he can brush off the covers and climb out of bed, he’s stopped by a hand pushing him firmly back into the pillows. He’s not in his own bed, not that he ever uses it; a glance around tells him that he’s in the medbay. “Slow down,” says the person standing over him—Nastya. He relaxes a bit. “You’re in no state to be getting out of bed.”

“I don’t  _ sleep,”  _ he protests, taking a gentle hold of her wrist and trying to steer her hand away so he can get up. It’s only then that he realizes how hard his hands are shaking. “I have no reason to be  _ in  _ bed in the first place.”

Nastya has no trouble resisting his efforts to brush her off, and she sits down on the edge of the bed to box him in further. “You’ve been unconscious for almost ten hours. Whether you were sleeping or not is a matter of semantics, but give yourself some time to wake up, at least.”

Arguing with Nastya is rarely worth his energy, so Brian slumps back against the pillows and crosses his arms over his chest so he can pretend to ignore how his hands shake. Most of the time, he’s more emotive than the average robot, but he’s still not used to trembling like this. The longer he sits there, the more awareness trickles in—there’s a thick weight in his chest, accompanied by something between his metal ribs that feels as much like a muscle twitch as it does a glitch. “What happened?”

“Massive EMP. All of our mechanisms were affected, but you were hit the worst. Obviously.”

His head snaps up to look at her. “Your cybernetics weren’t…?”

“Oh, they were,” Nastya responds. A rainbow gleam flickers across one of her eyes, fast enough that Brian has no idea whether he’s imagining it. “That’s why I’m in here, too.”

“And the Toy Soldier? Ivy?  _ Jonny?” _

As Nastya tilts her head back to stare at the ceiling, evidently annoyed by his compassion, Brian notes the pulsing trails of blue-gray under her skin where her mechanism is flooding her cybernetics in an attempt to heal them. “TS pretended to be hurt for a few minutes, until it realized most of us would be okay. Now it’s pretending to be fine, I think. I’m not sure.” She looks back down, then glares at Brian for having the audacity to look so concerned. “Ivy was out for a bit, but I don’t think it was much different than… what her brain does when she sleeps. And Jonny’s his usual self. His heart’s seen worse. You, on the other hand, are a  _ sap.” _

She’s not wrong, but Brian still huffs at her. “I care about you all, believe it or not.”

“Oh, I do.”

Brian looks around the medbay, getting a grip on his surroundings: old journals and textbooks stacked haphazardly on most of the cots; Marius’s unruly mop of hair bouncing around as he pretends to clean something on the far side of the room; a handful of medical implements on a tray near the foot of the bed, most likely as a way for Marius to boost his own ego. Next to him, Nastya sits with her arms crossed and her chin held high, even as Brian wraps an arm loosely around her waist and gives her an opening to lean into his side.

“You scared me,” she admits, matter-of-fact. Her voice glitches mid-sentence.

His hand at her waist flexes, not touching her for fear that he’ll grip too tight with his still-numb fingers. Sensation, apparently, is not high on the list of regenerative priorities. “Sorry?”

Nastya leans into him, resting her cheek on the top of his head and draping an arm over his shoulders. “I just—it—when it hit me, it felt like the virus that killed Cyberia. And that was nearly enough to take me out the first time I encountered it, so I wasn’t sure what this would do to you.”

“You would be alright without me,” Brian reminds her.

It’s the truth, but it’s not the right thing to say by any means. Nastya’s face crumples into a frustrated scowl as she curls closer to Brian’s side, and he wants so badly to hold her, to keep her warm with the constant whirring energy of his mechanism, but he’s still scared that he’ll crush her since he can hardly  _ feel  _ anything. “I know I would,” she replies after a minute. “None of us  _ need  _ each other, but we’d still lose our minds on our own.”

She lifts a hand to push her glasses up her nose, and Brian notices that her fingers are shaking just as hard as his own. “Cold?” he asks.

“No. Yes. It’s—my augmented… the cybernetics keep it at bay most of the time, but they’re not keeping up with the rest of my body right now.  _ You  _ try being a cold-blooded mammal.”

Brian smirks. “I’m not sure that I’d classify as an animal, even.”

At that moment, the door to the medbay opens with a bang, and a disheveled Jonny barrels in. To Brian’s surprise, he’s not covered in blood, though that might just be that he hasn’t had time to wreak any fresh violence after regenerating from whatever chaos resulted in an EMP taking them all out. “You’re awake,” he pants, pointing at Brian as if it’s an accusation.

“Loosely,” Brian responds.

Jonny, unlike Nastya, doesn’t bother to feign indifference. Within seconds, he’s crawling onto Brian’s cot and burrowing into his side, muddy boots and all. “Thought you were fuckin’ dead for a minute there. You kept sparking and twitching and shit, and then you got all rainbowy, and then  _ I  _ died so I don’t know what happened.”

“I’m fine now,” offers Brian. He doesn’t protest when Jonny grabs his arm and pulls it around himself like a weirdly-shaped blanket, though he’s still worried about crushing either him or Nastya on accident. “I mean, still recovering. But fine.”

“I thought you couldn’t lie,” Nastya mutters under her breath.

That’s an interesting philosophical quandary, depending on whether Brian genuinely  _ believes  _ that he’s fine, but he doesn’t have the energy to ponder it at the moment. “Do you need something, Jonny.”

“No.” The way Jonny tucks his head into the crook of Brian’s neck says otherwise.

If it  _ also  _ makes Brian’s heart flutter in his chest, Jonny doesn’t need to know.

**Author's Note:**

> alders can have little a fluffy Brian&Nastya as a treat. yes. this also contains Mild foreshadowing for tomorrow's fic >;3c get ready babey!!
> 
> comment to join the Brian And Nastya Are QPPs Club, which is a fun club for fun people who like building complex relationships with next to zero canon basis XD you can also join by just vibing really hard in my direction, or going to w w w dot alderations dot tumblr dot com and judging me for thirst-reblogging mechanisms photosets. I hope you all enjoyed this and are emotionally prepared for the next two days (if I actually have the time and energy to execute my ideas, lol).


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